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V3 reveals shortlist for its Technology Awards 2015

Online voting is now open

V3 has announced its Technology Awards 2015 shortlist, and online voting is now open.

Well done to all those firms and individuals who made it onto the 2015 shortlist. All the categories were hotly contested and it was an extremely tough job selecting the nominees. The full shortlist is published below.

We're now asking readers to vote online to decide the winners. The shortlist features 24 categories, such as Best SaaS Provider, Best Mobile App for Business and Customer Project of the Year, across six categories including Security, Cloud Computing and Infrastructure.

Voting is open now and closes at 5pm on Friday 9 October. The results will be announced at our awards ceremony at The Montcalm London on Friday, 27 November and will appear in a special online report on the V3 site.

Technology Hero of the YearElizabeth Eastaugh, director of technology at Expedia: After starting out as software developer at Capita IT in 2002, Elizabeth Eastaugh's tech career has seen her rise quickly through the ranks over the past decade. Now a director of technology for checkout and offer services at Expedia, she is currently managing teams across several continents, with a truly global view and influence. In the past year she has overseen the swift completion of major Hotels and Air checkout projects, generating significant improvements in the performance of these areas of the business. Her impressive Expedia journey started eight years ago when she joined as a software engineer before steadily rising to director of technology in March 2014.

Paul Saunders, chief technology officer and director of information and communication services at University of Dundee: Paul and his team developed the One IT Strategy, which aims to ensure the efficient coordination of resources for teams supporting information systems across the university. Since release, over 4,000 users have taken to the uod.box.com cloud to gain access to their free, unlimited storage capacity and introduce simplicity and ease into their daily work. In addition, the university has just rolled out SAS Curriculum Pathways to help students improve their career prospects. Despite his success, Paul understands there is still room for improvement and his ultimate aim is to help transform information sharing across the educational institution to make the University of Dundee Scotland's leading university.

Jacqueline de Rojas, area vice president of Northern Europe at Citrix: In one of Jacqueline de Rojas' first management roles, she was told that the company she worked for "didn't put women on the leadership team". Today, Jacqueline is a leading digital executive and a firm advocate of the importance of boardroom equality for business success. Using her position as a senior female leader in the technology industry alongside her newly appointed role as president of techUK, she dedicates much of her time to encouraging and empowering women to enter, remain and lead from the front in the sector. One of her personal values is generosity and she believes in sending the lift back down.

Tim Griffin, vice president and general manager at Dell UK: Being responsible for over 2,500 people across seven major sites across the UK for a global company, Tim has driven incredible growth for the company over the last year. Tim also works to encourage diversity within organisations to build stronger teams and is the executive sponsor for True Ability, Dell's employee resource group that supports team members affected by disabilities or special needs. He also shows commitment to gender diversity in the IT industry, and a recent column demonstrated his thoughts on the importance of women fulfilling their potential. Finally, Tim is an avid supporter of Dell's charity initiatives, and regularly sleeps rough for Byte Night, raising thousands of pounds for disadvantaged young people in the UK with Action for Children.

Marcin Kleczynski, CEO and founder at Malwarebytes: Marcin is the 25-year-old CEO and founder of Malwarebytes, used by hundreds of millions of people. Marcin's passion for innovation and strong moral standing is spliced into the company DNA. His belief in protecting people from digital 'bad guys' means the company has committed to a unique freemium model for its consumer products. This pays huge loyalty dividends, prompting nearly 100 people each week to email the company with their thanks; Marcin replies personally to every one. Bootstrapping his company into a settled market dominated by huge corporations, he knew disruption and differentiation would be vital. This has been achieved with an entirely unique technical approach, brand and business model.

Customer Project of the YearBiblioteca open+/Peterborough City Council Libraries: In response to financial challenges, the need to save money while at the same time improve services to the public, the council rolled out the UK's first open+ model of libraries delivered by Biblioteca. This technology enabled the council to save £350,000 a year by moving from 261 staffed hours to 387 hours, of which open+ enables 238 self-service hours. In essence this reduced the cost of the library service by over 20 percent and provided a 50 percent increase in availability of the service.

Qlik/British Gas Smart Metering: The logistics behind scheduling engineers to travel to and access customer homes and fit the British Gas Smart Metering (BGSM) equipment is a complex process. By deploying QlikView, the management team was able to gain access to business information they could easily drill into themselves, safe in the knowledge that there was one single version of the truth. Due to the time savings being made through data analysis and the increased efficiency of their smart meter installation process, BGSM is now able to ensure it is on track to deliver its target of 16 million smart meter installations.

Tintri/Housing & Care 21: Tintri has been working with Housing & Care 21, a not-for-profit provider of retirement housing and care services for people aged 65 and over. Housing & Care 21 is using Tintri's VMstore to underpin its virtualised environment. With the Tintri VMstore T880 and VMstore T850 systems deployed, backups are now 50 per cent faster compared with the company's previous EMC solution. Management has been simplified and Housing & Care 21 now benefits from a 10 per cent reduction in power costs and a smaller data centre footprint.

Dell/The Translational Genomics Research Institute: TGen is the force behind the most ground-breaking research into paediatric cancer. Dell has donated $3m in funding to support TGen's cancer clinical trials in France and Lebanon, expanding the partnership to the EMEA region for the first time. The extended partnership will optimise critical high-performance computing throughout the organisation's EMEA sites, allowing TGen to store more data and reach more patients than ever before. For example, the amount of time needed to analyse a patient's molecular data has been reduced from 10 days to just six hours.

Splunk Enterprise/Shazam: Shazam is using Splunk Enterprise to deliver key business insights from the multiple terabytes of data generated by the Shazam app. Shazam regularly delivers analytics from Splunk software to its salesforce and advertising partners to better understand campaign effectiveness. The dashboards include statistics such as counts of product information requests, the geographic location of tags, device type, operating system, broad user trends and real-time purchasing patterns. Employees throughout the organisation, including product managers and engineers, also rely on Splunk Enterprise to enhance app performance and increase user engagement.

Tibco/Marks & Spencer: In essence, the mission to democratise data throughout M&S has been accomplished via the use of the TIBCO Spotfire analytics and business intelligence platform. Incorporating advanced analytics at a level that is ingrained with the business has generated a far deeper level of understanding across the retail brand. And the result is a more agile, connected and collaborative business poised for an increasingly digital future. In providing a 360-degree view of the customer experience, big data analytics has given the customer experience a next-generation makeover with improved understanding of purchase patterns and shopping behaviours, to name a few.

Box/University of Dundee: Box was deployed campus-wide by the University of Dundee in March 2015 as a file store, sync and share service available to all students and staff. Prior to Box, the university's diverse user base relied on legacy infrastructure, USB pens, email attachments and paper trails, making collaboration and project management a constant challenge. The university selected Box because it provided secure and mobile access to content and enabled collaboration with anyone, anytime, anywhere on an unrivalled scale. Since release, over 4,000 users have taken to the uod.box.com cloud and, even more impressively, over 4.5 million files were uploaded onto the system in the first three months alone.